Most of you know I'm a metalhead and like to expand my tastes like listen to gothic metal ie Nightwish and Within Temptation. About 2 months ago, I was watching Anime Networks "Bento Beatbox". It is a 30 min show about J-POP, J-ROCK AND J-Metal music with videos. One was all girl group named "Kalafina". They're a J-POP group and they sounded real good IMHO. But the video that caught my attention was a group named "Versailles". This was mind blowing stuff. The mind blowing stuff was the fact few guys were crossdressed as women and my god, I had to double take few times watching the video "ASCENDEAD MASTER". The lead guitarist named Hizaki was... wow. He got me fooled until I saw his hands. I was like "THAT'S A GUY!!!!" with my jaw on my wheelchair tray. Their sound is kind of poetic but sad, but with upbeat sound with monsterous riffs and drumming. Most of their songs is about death, saddness, immortality. Their costumes are based on early 1800's gothic. From I read, they designed their costumes. As I searched on YOUTUBE for more videos and search on Goggle for information about these guys, I learned the genre was called Visual Kei. Think of it being Extreme Glam Rock. You could say that for a example of American Visual Kei IMHO is Kiss. And I hate to say it but Versailles' songs are MUCH better than Kiss' new stuff (I only heard Kiss' new single and it was ehhhh, standard Kiss fare).
Below is few samples of their work.
Ascendead Master (Subbed, HD)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRjhiArtpBg
Suzerain (Live, unsubbed, HQ)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4grgMaaRIkk
Continued on next post.
Falcon